Properties of Krakatoa

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Krakatoa is rendering engine for rendering particles and fluids. It can extract information from several fluid -and particle systems such as FumeFX, RealFlow and PFlow. Krakatoa is much faster at rendering fluids than any other engine, but the only downside is that Krakatoa renders only fluids. It can’t render other geometry (excluding matte geometry) and must be composited later on to the final image. Krakatoa has several advanced qualities in rendering fluids, including absorption, illumination and Ambient Participating Medium Extinction (APME) which can be used to simulate the attenuation of light as it passes through a medium.

Lighting and Shading

Lighting and Shading section includes all the crucial settings for rendering fluid volumes.

Particle Rendering Mode

In particle rendering mode, Krakatoa renders any represented datasets using dots for each particle, which results in higher detail volumes than voxel rendering, and is currently faster. Also exclusive in Particle Rendering Mode is that the volume can be illuminated from inside, which essential for example when rendering stardust.

Voxel Rendering Mode

This mode currently works only in FumeFX. The Voxel Rendering Mode represents the extracted dataset as fields, like slices layered on top of another to form the desired fluid volume. The advantages of the Voxel Rendering Mode is that lesser amount of particles is needed for coherent looking fluid volumes, and is more suitable for fly-through animations since there is no smallest parts in the fluid volume as with the Particle Rendering Mode.

Use Emission

By enabling this option, one can simulate the effect of self-illuminating fluid volume.

Use Absorption

By enabling this option, one can simulate the effect of part of the energy of the light which passes through the volume will be absorbed in it.